Hello, Friends. Hope the festive season is keeping you healthy and happy. Here things have been extremely busy. I’ve hardly had time to post anything. But I promise to make up for all the lost time as soon as the new year begins … uh, is that a new year resolution? Well, sort of.

Talking of new year, here are some interesting quotes on the new year:

* Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man. ~ Benjamin Franklin

* New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday. ~ Charles Lamb

* Never tell your resolution beforehand, or it’s twice as onerous a duty. ~ John Selden

* Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true. ~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson

* New Year’s Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. ~ Mark Twain

* For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make beginning. ~ T.S. Eliot

* Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account. ~ Oscar Wilde

* One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things. ~ John Burroughs

* May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions. ~ Joey Adams

* A happy New Year! Grant that I
May bring no tear to any eye
When this New Year in time shall end
Let it be said I’ve played the friend,
Have lived and loved and labored here,
And made of it a happy year. ~ Edgar Guest

One of my students recently asked me exactly what a white paper was since he had seen it used in different ways. He was right – it is used in different ways. There’s the American way and there’s the British way.

In American English, a white paper is an authoritative report, or a guide, that addresses issues and problems, and the different ways of solving them. It is generally used by businesses as a marketing or sales tool. For example, a white paper of a business that deals in technical products is a document that promotes the products by giving their details, their benefits, and if there are problems, ways of solving them. This information may be given separately, or all together. That is – there may be white papers giving technical details of the products (like how the products work), or white papers stating the benefits of the products, or those which are troubleshooting guides, or they may be combinations of two or more of these. The purpose of these white papers is to inform and educate prospective buyers about the products.

In British English, a white paper is a parliamentary paper stating government policy on a certain issue or issues. The topic is usually a current issue which the government talks about in detail in the white paper – what the issue or concern is, the government’s policy on the issue, how it proposes to deal with it, and whether a law will be passed or not.

In Britain and the Commonwealth countries, the term “white paper” has been used for several decades. The term originated when a shorter version of a “blue book” (a detailed government policy report bound in blue covers) was introduced for wider use. This shorter version was bound in the same white paper as the ones on which the text was written – hence the name “white paper”. But the use of the term in America and elsewhere is only as recent as the early 1990’s. It was adopted by the IT industry to describe technical documents (as defined above).

A relatively new term is a “video white paper’. This is the same thing as a “white paper” (as in the American sense) with the only difference that it is presented in video format. The information of the white paper is presented not only verbally, but also involves the use of graphics, graphs, and animations.

Do you know of any other definition of “white paper”? How would you describe it?